Meanwhile, Nila lives in a building defaced by swastika graffiti, probably the handiwork of skinheads living down her hall. Women in head scarves have been stabbed on the streets. Buildings housing asylum seekers keep being set on fire, as do immigrants’ bakeries.

And so, attempting to escape some of these limits, rules and perils, Nila lies. She lies to her father about the clubs, parties, drugs and sexual partners. “My own daughter thinks I’m an idiot, that I don’t know what she’s doing,” Karim says. So far, so teenage; but she also hides her full name, Nilab Haddadi, going by the less legible Nila with the hope of seeming “anything, anything but Muslim.”

Instead, Nila tells friends she’s Italian, or Colombian, or Spanish, or Israeli, or Greek. Upon meeting the dissolute, much older man who becomes her boyfriend, Nila lies about her family’s poverty and the neighborhood where she grew up. She invents “the fairer, better life” her parents lost when they had to go into exile.

The lies, though prolific, do not come easily: In Nila’s favorite Quran story, an archangel cuts out the heart of the prophet and cleans it of sin. “Whenever I harbored guilt,” Nila thinks, “I prayed to the angels and God to cut out my heart and wash it too.” Gradually, she moves toward craving not just escape but also the transcendence that can come with trying to live for something larger and more lasting, both in the pursuit of art —Nila wants to be a photographer — and in community and political action.

Aber’s first book was a collection of poetry; she has published astonishing poems I’ve read dozens of times. It’s thrilling to see her turn major poetic gifts toward the sweep of this Künstlerroman, the story of a young woman becoming other than she used to be. While reading “Good Girl,” I thought of James Baldwin, writing in a letter that “the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” With her novel, Aber has made the world more spacious: More people will find a place to fit.

GOOD GIRL | By Aria Aber | Hogarth | 352 pp. | $29